Search results for

With non-performing loans at some Thai banks running at horrifying rates, it's perhaps understandable that tough collection methods are needed, but isn't hiring martial arts experts a step too far?

A good dose of Anglo-Saxon culture is what the European Central Bank needs on its executive board, and the quickest way to achieve that is for the UK to join the euro. This isn't UK prime minister Tony Blair speaking, it's Francesco Giavazzi, economics professor at Bocconi University in Milan.

Euroland Municipal Bonds: New city states

For a country crippled by bloody civil war, Sri Lanka has seen dramatic progress in privatization over the last three years. Even as bombs blew up the heart of Colombo's business district in October 1997 - an area housing the central bank, the Colombo stock exchange, the Securities Exchange Commission and the Bank of Ceylon - the country earned record revenues from privatization. The sale of the country's telecom monopoly, its second-largest development bank, half a dozen small state companies and several plantation companies, raised SLR22.5 billion ($336 million) in 1997, contributing 11.5% of total government revenue. The budget deficit for 1997 fell to 7.9% from 9.4% in the previous year, no mean achievement for a country that spends around 5% of its GDP on security.

Investors converge on Hungary

No single benchmark yield curve has emerged for the euro. So there is some confusion about how Eurobond issues should be priced. That anomaly raises deeper questions about how government debt and its derivatives will trade in future and which electronic platform will grab the lion's share. David Shirreff reports.

Why did Morgan Stanley Dean Witter fly its international top brass to an urgently cobbled-together press conference in Madrid, five days after the news leaked of an acquisition so tiny in the grand scheme of its financials that the firm did not even have to report it publicly? Because the deal kicks off the European roll-out of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's global strategy.

In the film "Blame it on Rio", Michael Caine plays a middle-aged man with marital problems who falls for his best friend's daughter during a holiday in Rio de Janeiro. The heady atmosphere of one of the world's most alluring cities is apparently the cause of this lapse in judgement. If only it were just a movie.

Michael Hughes spent 16 years in the trading rooms of the City. He worked for Samuel Montagu, Kidder Peabody and Amro Bank. Made redundant some 10 years ago he now runs a holiday business on the Pembrokeshire coast.

A shiver went through the international markets in February. The disaster in Russia entered a new phase as Unexim, the country's fourth-largest bank by assets, defaulted on its Eurobonds - bonds that are usually held sacrosanct.

At the age of 55, Richard Handley, former Latin American head of Citibank and architect of Argentina's foremost communications and media empire, has decided to get out while he is ahead. Although he continues as a director of CEI Citicorp Holdings, the company he created, he stepped down as CEO in September "to spend more time with my wife and on the farm. I'm playing a bit more golf too".

The euro is expected to speed the growth of a US-style market in local-authority bonds. In euroland, nations now matter less: cities and regions are becoming economic and financial actors in their own right. Banks are fighting hard to woo them as clients. But would-be investors aren't happy with the poor liquidity. What does this fast-growing market need to succeed? Marcus Walker reports.